SPACE / COSMOS

Egg-shaped galaxies may be aligned to the black holes at their hearts, astronomers find

The Conversation
November 18, 2024

The active galaxy Centaurus A, with jets emanating from the central black hole. ESO/WFI (Optical); MPIfR/ESO/APEX/A.Weiss et al. (Submillimetre); NASA/CXC/CfA/R.Kraft et al. (X-ray), CC BY

Black holes don’t have many identifying features. They come in one color (black) and one shape (spherical).

The main difference between black holes is mass: some weigh about as much as a star like our Sun, while others weigh around a million times more. Stellar-mass black holes can be found anywhere in a galaxy, but the really big ones (known as supermassive black holes) are found in the cores of galaxies.

These supermassive behemoths are still quite tiny when seen in cosmic perspective, typically containing only around 1% of their host galaxy’s mass and extending only to a millionth of its width

However, as we have just discovered, there is a surprising link between what goes on near the black hole and the shape of the entire galaxy that surrounds it. Our results are published in Nature Astronomy.

When black holes light up

Supermassive black holes are fairly rare. Our Milky Way galaxy has one at its centre (named Sagittarius A*), and many other galaxies also seem to host a single supermassive black hole at their core.


Under the right circumstances, dust and gas falling into these galactic cores can form a disk of hot material around the black hole. This “accretion disk” in turn generates a super-heated jet of charged particles that are ejected from the black hole at mind-boggling velocities, close to the speed of light.

When a supermassive black hole lights up like this, we call it a quasar.

How to watch a quasar

To get a good look at quasar jets, astronomers often use radio telescopes. In fact, we sometimes combine observations from multiple radio telescopes located in different parts of the world.

Using a technique called very long baseline interferometry, we can in effect make a single telescope the size of the entire Earth. This massive eye is much better at resolving fine detail than any individual telescope.

As a result, we can not only see objects and structures much smaller than we can with the naked eye, we can do better than the James Webb Space Telescope.



Black holes are millions of times smaller than galaxies, yet make jets that are pointed in the same direction as the entire galaxy. Optical image: NASA, ESA, R.M. Crockett (University of Oxford, U.K.), S. Kaviraj (Imperial College London and University of Oxford, U.K.), J. Silk (University of Oxford), M. Mutchler (Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, USA), R. O'Connell (University of Virginia, Charlottesville, USA), and the WFC3 Scientific Oversight Committee. Top right: MOJAVE Collaboration, NRAO/NSF. Bottom right: Event Horizon Telescope / ESO (same as before) CC BY-SA

This is the technique that was used to make the first “black hole image” in 2019, showing the halo of light generated around the supermassive black hole hosted by the galaxy M87.


Quasar jets that can be detected using very long baseline interferometry can be millions of light years long and are almost always found in elliptical galaxies. Using very long baseline interferometry, we can observe them all the way down to a few light years or so from their black hole of origin.

The direction of the jet near its source tells us about the orientation of the accretion disk, and so potentially the properties of the black hole itself.

Connection to the host galaxy


What about the host galaxies? A galaxy is a three-dimensional object, formed of hundreds of billions of stars.

But it appears to us (observed in optical or infrared) in projection, either as an ellipse or a spiral. We can measure the shape of these galaxies, tracing the profile of starlight, and measure the long axis and short axis of the two-dimensional shape.

In our paper, we compared the direction of quasar jets with the direction of this shorter axis of the galaxy ellipse, and found that they tend to be pointing in the same direction. This alignment is more statistically significant than you would expect if they were both randomly oriented.

This is surprising, as the black hole is so small (the jets we measure are only a few light years in length) compared to the host galaxy (which can be hundreds of thousands or even millions of light years across).

It is surprising that such a relatively small object can affect, or be affected by, the environment on such large scales. We might expect to see a correlation between the jet and the local environment, but not with the whole galaxy.
How galaxies form

Does this have something to say about the way galaxies form?


Spiral galaxies are perhaps the most famous kind of galaxy, but sometimes they collide with other spirals and form elliptical galaxies. We see these three-dimensional egg-shaped blobs as two-dimensional ellipses on the sky.

The merger process triggers quasar activity in ways we don’t fully understand. As a result, almost all quasar jets that can be detected using very long baseline interferometry are hosted in elliptical galaxies.

The exact interpretation of our results remains mysterious, but is important in the context of the recent James Webb Space Telescope discovery of highly massive quasars (with massive black holes), which have formed much earlier in the universe than expected. Clearly, our understanding of how galaxies form and how black holes influence that needs to be updated.


David Parkinson, Research Scientist in Astrophysics, The University of Queensland and Jeffrey Hodgson, Assistant Professor in Astrophysics, Sejong University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

AnalySwift receives NASA STTR contract to transform spacecraft infrastructure for secondary uses during long-duration missions

Company and Purdue will develop composite heater layer and better engineering tools for composites

Purdue University

 

image: 

Kawai Kwok, an associate professor in Purdue University’s School of Aeronautics and Astronautics, will be the primary investigator on a project with commercial software provider AnalySwift LLC. NASA has awarded AnalySwift a $156,424 Phase I Small Business Technology Transfer contract for the research.

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Credit: (Purdue University photo/Alan Cesar)

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — AnalySwift LLC, a Purdue University-affiliated company, has received a Phase I STTR (Small Business Technology Transfer) contract from NASA worth $156,424.

Allan Wood, AnalySwift president and CEO, said the contract will fund two advancements: processes and hardware to disassemble spacecraft components and reassemble them for a secondary use, and software for multiphysics simulation and analysis of the involved thermoplastics.

Kawai Kwok, associate professor in Purdue’s School of Aeronautics and Astronautics, is the principal investigator.

Wood said long-duration crewed missions to the moon, Mars and beyond require infrastructure, such as trusses, to be constructed sustainably on these surfaces. But there are immense logistical challenges in transporting heavy and large payloads to space.

“The AnalySwift project proposes a novel method of disassembling and reassembling thermoplastic composite joints in space,” he said. “Our proposed method enables reconfiguration of truss structures in space, transitioning away from the current one-time use model to a scalable and sustainable approach.”

Kwok said spacecraft components could be quickly and easily repurposed into vastly different geometries.

“For example, a lunar lander support truss could become a vertical solar array support truss,” he said. “There are other applications, depending on mission needs using the same set of structural elements and innovative multiphysics modeling.”

Contract deliverables

Kwok said AnalySwift will develop a composite heater layer for the trusses and other infrastructure; it will be embedded with nanostructured carbon fillers. The layer will be made from the same thermoplastic matrix as the adhered composite parts. The layer will bring the matrix to the processing temperature for interface debonding by mechanical forces.

“Lightweight conductive nanocarbon thin films will be encapsulated inside semicrystalline thermoplastics such as PEEK (polyether ether ketone),” he said. “The disassembled struts and joints will be reassembled to the repurposed configuration via resistance welding using the same or additional heaters. The proposed in situ heating and reassembly method enables spacecraft components to be reutilized, which greatly reduces the logistical footprint to deliver technologies to space.”

Liang Zhang, senior research scientist at AnalySwift, said the company also will develop better engineering tools for composites, enabling reliable multiphysics simulation of their technique to repurpose lightweight structures made from thermoplastics.

“Theoretical and computational developments will include a new software tool or module, Thermoplastic Composites Multiphysics,” he said. “This multiphysics modeling framework will simulate the debonding and bonding processes of thermoplastic composite joint-strut interfaces using embedded carbon nanoheaters.”

Kwok said the framework has broader applications for thermoplastics.

“Advancements include developing multiphysics models and data for electrical heating and welding, including establishing relations between bonding strength and the process conditions of temperature, pressure and time,” he said. “More specifically, the disassembly and assembly processes of a nanocomposite is simulated using a third-party commercial finite element code with user subroutines defining the governing behavior of the material system.”

Zhang said AnalySwift’s multiphysics simulation tool will determine force, pressure and temperature histories during assembly and disassembly processes.

“More specifically, it will incrementally solve the constitutive relations as an initial value problem, extract temperature distributions at specific time points, and calculate the time and power required for completion,” he said.

Non-space applications

Wood said the processes and hardware advancements for disassembly and reassembly are more applicable to space applications, but the software has other potential uses.

“It can be particularly useful where simulation tools can improve utilization possibilities for high-performance thermoplastics,” he said. “Additional applications can be likely for aerospace, defense, automotive, marine, energy, electronics, sporting goods and medical devices. Applications also extend beyond simulation and into repair for thermoplastics.”

About AnalySwift

AnalySwift LLC is a provider of composite simulation software, which enables an unprecedented combination of efficiency and accuracy, including multiphysics structural and micromechanics modeling. Drawing on cutting-edge university technology, AnalySwift’s powerful solutions save orders of magnitude in computing time without a loss of accuracy so users can consider more design options and arrive at the best solution more quickly. The technologies deliver the accuracy of detailed 3D finite element analysis at the efficiency of simple engineering models. SwiftComp was developed at Purdue University and licensed from the Purdue Research Foundation. Contact AnalySwift at info@analyswift.com.

About Purdue Innovates Office of Technology Commercialization

The Purdue Innovates Office of Technology Commercialization operates one of the most comprehensive technology transfer programs among leading research universities in the U.S. Services provided by this office support the economic development initiatives of Purdue University and benefit the university’s academic activities through commercializing, licensing and protecting Purdue intellectual property. In fiscal year 2024, the office reported 145 deals finalized with 224 technologies signed, 466 invention disclosures received, and 290 U.S. and international patents received. The office is managed by the Purdue Research Foundation, a private, nonprofit foundation created to advance the mission of Purdue University. Contact otcip@prf.org for more information.

About Purdue University

Purdue University is a public research institution demonstrating excellence at scale. Ranked among top 10 public universities and with two colleges in the top four in the United States, Purdue discovers and disseminates knowledge with a quality and at a scale second to none. More than 105,000 students study at Purdue across modalities and locations, including nearly 50,000 in person on the West Lafayette campus. Committed to affordability and accessibility, Purdue’s main campus has frozen tuition 13 years in a row. See how Purdue never stops in the persistent pursuit of the next giant leap — including its first comprehensive urban campus in Indianapolis, the Mitch Daniels School of Business, Purdue Computes and the One Health initiative — at https://www.purdue.edu/president/strategic-initiatives.

Media contact: Steve Martin, sgmartin@prf.org

New idea may crack enigma of the Crab Nebula’s ‘zebra’ pattern

University of Kansas

 

image: 

Medvedev modeled wave diffraction off a circular reflecting region with radially varying index of refraction outside of it to better understand the Crab Nebula’s zebra pattern.

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Credit: Mikhail Medvedev

LAWRENCE — A theoretical astrophysicist from the University of Kansas may have solved a nearly two-decade-old mystery over the origins of an unusual "zebra" pattern seen in high-frequency radio pulses from the Crab Nebula.

His findings have just been published in Physical Review Letters (PRL), among the most prestigious physics journals.

The Crab Nebula features a neutron star at its center that has formed into a 12-mile-wide pulsar pinwheeling electromagnetic radiation across the cosmos.

“The emission, which resembles a lighthouse beam, repeatedly sweeps past Earth as the star rotates,” said lead author Mikhail Medvedev, professor of physics & astronomy at KU. “We observe this as a pulsed emission, usually with one or two pulses per rotation. The specific pulsar I’m discussing is known as the Crab Pulsar, located in the center of the Crab Nebula 6,000 light years away from us.”

The Crab Nebula is the remnant of a supernova that appeared in 1054.

“Historical records, including Chinese accounts, describe an unusually bright star appearing in the sky,” said the KU researcher.

But unlike any other known pulsar, Medvedev said the Crab Pulsar features a zebra pattern — unusual band spacing in the electromagnetic spectrum proportional to band frequencies, and other weird features like high polarization and stability.

“It’s very bright, across practically all wave bands,” he said. “This is the only object we know of that produces the zebra pattern, and it only appears in a single emission component from the Crab Pulsar. The main pulse is a broadband pulse, typical of most pulsars, with other broadband components common to neutron stars. However, the high-frequency interpulse is unique, ranging between 5 and 30 gigahertz — frequencies similar to those in a microwave oven.”

Since this pattern was discovered in a 2007 paper, the KU researcher said the pattern had proved “baffling” for investigators.

“Researchers proposed various emission mechanisms, but none have convincingly explained the observed patterns,” he said.

Using data from the Crab Pulsar, Medvedev established a method using wave optics to gauge the density of the pulsar’s plasma – the “gas” of charged particles (electrons and positrons) — using a fringe pattern found in the electromagnetic pulses.

“If you have a screen and an electromagnetic wave passes by, the wave doesn’t propagate straight through,” Medvedev said. “In geometrical optics, shadows cast by obstacles would extend indefinitely — if you’re in the shadow, there’s no light; outside of it, you see light. But wave optics introduces a different behavior — waves bend around obstacles and interfere with each other, creating a sequence of bright and dim fringes due to constructive and destructive interference.”

This well-known fringe pattern phenomenon is caused by consistent constructive interference but has different characteristics when radio waves propagate around a neutron star.

“A typical diffraction pattern would produce evenly spaced fringes if we just had a neutron star as a shield,” the KU researcher said. “But here, the neutron star’s magnetic field generates charged particles constituting a dense plasma, which varies with distance from the star. As a radio wave propagates through the plasma, it passes through dilute areas but is reflected by dense plasma. This reflection varies by frequency: Low frequencies reflect at large radii, casting a bigger shadow, while high frequencies create smaller shadows, resulting in different fringe spacing.”

In this way, Medvedev determined the Crab Pulsar’s plasma matter causes diffraction in the electromagnetic pulses responsible for the neutron star’s singular zebra pattern.

“This model is the first one capable of measuring those parameters,” Medvedev said. “By analyzing the fringes, we can deduce the density and distribution of plasma in the magnetosphere. It's incredible because these observations allow us to convert fringe measurements into a density distribution of the plasma, essentially creating an image or performing tomography of the neutron star's magnetosphere.”

Next, Medvedev said his theory can be tested with collection of more data from the Crab Pulsar and fine-tuned by factoring in its powerful and strange gravitational and polarization effects. The new understanding of how a plasma matter alters a pulsar’s signal will change how astrophysicists understand other pulsars.

“The Crab Pulsar is somewhat unique — it’s relatively young by astronomical standards, only about a thousand years old, and highly energetic,” he said. “But it’s not alone; we know of hundreds of pulsars, with over a dozen that are also young. Known binary pulsars, which were used to test Einstein’s general relativity theory, can also be explored with the proposed method. This research can indeed broaden our understanding and observation techniques for pulsars, particularly young, energetic ones.”

---

Journal

Physical Review Letters

DOI

10.1103/PhysRevLett.133.205201 

We finally know where black holes get their magnetic fields: Their parents

Simulations of exploded highly magnetized stars collapsing into black holes reveal that they ‘pass down’ their magnetic fields to their newly formed black hole’s surrounding disk of swirling matter.

Simons Foundation

 

image: 

3D rendering of a rapidly spinning black hole's accretion disk and a resulting black hole-powered jet

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Credit: Ore Gottlieb et al. (2024)

Black holes are one of the most enigmatic stellar objects. While best known for swallowing up their surroundings into a gravity pit from which nothing can escape, they can also shoot off powerful jets of charged particles, leading to explosive bursts of gamma rays that can release more energy in mere seconds than our sun will emit in its entire lifetime. For such a spectacular event to occur, a black hole needs to carry a powerful magnetic field. Where this magnetism comes from, however, has been a long-standing mystery.

Using calculations of black hole formation, scientists at the Flatiron Institute and their collaborators have finally found the origin of those magnetic fields: the collapsing parent stars of the black holes themselves. The researchers report their results November 18 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Black holes can form after a star explodes as a supernova, leaving behind a dense remnant core called a proto-neutron star.

“Proto-neutron stars are the mothers of black holes in that when they collapse, a black hole is born. What we are seeing is that as this black hole forms, the proto-neutron star’s surrounding disk will essentially pin its magnetic lines to the black hole,” says Ore Gottlieb, the study’s first author and a research fellow at the Flatiron Institute’s Center for Computational Astrophysics (CCA) in New York City. “It’s very exciting to finally understand this fundamental property of black holes and how they power gamma ray bursts — the most luminous explosions in the universe.”

Gottlieb co-authored the study with fellow CCA researchers Brian Metzger, Jared Goldberg, Matteo Cantiello and Mathieu Renzo.

The Magnetism Mystery

The team initially aimed to model a star’s journey from birth to collapse to black hole formation. With their simulations, the team planned to study outflows from the black hole, like jets that generate gamma ray bursts. However, Gottlieb’s team ran into a problem with the models.

“We were not sure how to model behavior of these magnetic fields during the collapse of the neutron star to the black hole,” Gottlieb says. “So, this was a question that I started to think about for the first time.”

There were a few theories surrounding black holes and their magnetism, but none seemed to add up when accounting for the power of a black hole’s jets and gamma ray bursts.

“What had been thought to be the case is that the magnetic fields of collapsing stars are collapsing into the black hole,” says Gottlieb. “During this collapse, these magnetic field lines are made stronger as they are compressed, so the density of the magnetic fields become higher.”

The problem with that explanation was that strong magnetism in the star causes the star to lose its rotation. And without rapid rotation, a newborn black hole can’t form an accretion disk — the flow of gas, plasma, dust and particles around a black hole — and could not produce the jets and gamma ray bursts we’ve observed.

“It appears to be mutually exclusive,” says Gottlieb. “You need two things for jets to form: a strong magnetic field and an accretion disk. But a magnetic field acquired by such compression won’t form an accretion disk, and if you reduce the magnetism to the point where the disk can form, then it’s not strong enough to produce the jets.”

This meant something else was going on, and the scientists aimed to find out what it was by going straight to the source: a black hole’s parent.

A Black Hole’s Magnetic Parent: The Neutron Star

The scientists realized that perhaps previous simulations of collapsing neutron stars weren’t giving the full picture.

“Past simulations have only considered isolated neutron stars and isolated black holes, where all magnetism is lost during the collapse. However, we found that these neutron stars have accretion disks of their own, just like black holes,” says Gottlieb. “And so, the idea is that maybe an accretion disk can save the magnetic field of the neutron star. This way, a black hole will form with the same magnetic field lines that threaded the neutron star.”

The team’s calculations showed that as a neutron star collapses, before all its magnetic field is swallowed up by the newly formed black hole, the neutron star’s disk is inherited by the black hole and its magnetic field lines become anchored.

“We ran calculations for the typical values that we expect to see in these systems, and in most cases, the timescale for black hole disk formation is shorter than that of the black hole losing its magnetism,” says Gottlieb. “So the disk enables the black hole to inherit a magnetic field from its mother, the neutron star.”

Implications Across the Cosmos

Gottlieb is excited about the new discovery not only because it solves a longstanding mystery but also because it opens the door for further studies of jets.

“This study changes the way we think about what types of systems can support jet formation because if we know that accretion disks imply magnetism, then in theory, all you need is an early disk formation to power jets,” he says. “I think it would be interesting for us to rethink all of the connections between populations of stars and jet formation now that we know this.”

Gottlieb credits team science and the capabilities at CCA for making this work possible.

“This was a multidisciplinary collaboration that enabled us to address this question from different directions and form a coherent picture of a star’s evolution post-collapse,” he says. “And the generous computational resources of CCA let us run simulations of the collapse more consistently than has ever been done before. I think these two aspects led to an innovative approach.”

ABOUT THE FLATIRON INSTITUTE

The Flatiron Institute is the research division of the Simons Foundation. The institute's mission is to advance scientific research through computational methods, including data analysis, theory, modeling and simulation. The institute's Center for Computational Astrophysics creates new computational frameworks that allow scientists to analyze big astronomical datasets and to understand complex, multi-scale physics in a cosmological context.

Black hole jets video [VIDEO] |

Black hole magnetism infographic (IMAGE)

Simons Foundation

Infographic explaining how black holes inherit their magnetism

Credit

Lucy Reading-Ikkanda / Simons Foundatio

Journal

The Astrophysical Journal Letters

DOI

10.3847/2041-8213/ad8563 

Method of Research

Computational simulation/modeling

Subject of Research

Not applicable

Article Title

She’s Got Her Mother’s Hair: Unveiling the Origin of Black Hole Magnetic Fields through Stellar to Collapsar Simulations

Article Publication Date

18-Nov-2024

New study reveals possible origins of dark matter in "Dark Big Bang" scenario

Colgate University

Hamilton, NY – Recent research by a student-faculty team at Colgate University unlocks new clues that could radically change the world’s understanding of the origin of dark matter.

Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy Cosmin Ilie and Richard Casey ’24 have explored an idea put forth by two scientists at the University of Texas at Austin, Katherine Freese and Martin Winkler, suggesting that dark matter may have originated from a separate “Dark Big Bang,” occurring shortly after the birth of the universe.

It is widely accepted that all the matter filling our universe (including dark matter) originated from one major event — the Big Bang. This corresponds to the end of the cosmic inflation period, when the vacuum energy that drove the very brief extreme expansion initial phase of our universe was converted into a hot plasma of radiation and particles. 

One of the most pressing mysteries is the origin and the nature of dark matter, which accounts for about 25% of the energy budget of the Universe today. While not yet directly detected in underground experiments, or observed in accelerators, the gravitational effects of dark matter have been firmly established on galactic and extragalactic scales. Moreover, dark matter leaves observable imprints on the electromagnetic afterglow of the Big Bang, the so-called cosmic microwave background radiation.  

In 2023, Freese and Winkler proposed that dark matter, unlike ordinary matter, may have arisen from a distinct Big Bang event, which could have taken place months after the conventional Big Bang [1]. In this model, dark matter particles are produced via the decay of a quantum field that  only couples to the Dark Sector and is initially trapped in a false metastable vacuum state.

In their recent study [2], Ilie and Casey explore and refine this Dark Big Bang model by determining all the possible scenarios for its realization that remain consistent with current experimental data. Most notably, their work uncovers a previously unexplored range of possible parameters that could explain dark matter’s origin. The study also determines the potential observable consequences of these new scenarios, particularly the generation of gravitational waves that could be detectable by future experiments.

“Detecting gravitational waves generated by the Dark Big Bang could provide crucial evidence for this new theory of dark matter,” said Ilie “With current experiments like the International Pulsar Timing Array (IPTA) and the Square Kilometer Array (SKA) on the horizon, we may soon have the tools to test this model in unprecedented ways.”

The 2023 detection of background gravitational waves by the NANOGrav collaboration, part of IPTA, could be linked to a realization of the Dark Big Bang. As future experiments provide more precise measurements, the study’s findings could help refine our understanding of the parameters governing the Dark Big Bang and potentially confirm it as the true origin of dark matter.

The implications of these discoveries could extend beyond dark matter, as they offer a new perspective on the early history of the universe and the forces that shaped its evolution. The search for answers to the mysteries of dark matter and its origins continues to drive research at the forefront of modern cosmology.

[1] Katherine Freese and Martin Winkler,  Phys.Rev.D 107 (2023) 8, 083522

[2] Richard Casey and Cosmin Ilie, Phys.Rev.D (2024) 110, 103522

---

Journal

Physical Review D

DOI

10.1103/PhysRevD.110.103522 

Method of Research

Computational simulation/modeling

Subject of Research

Not applicable

Article Title

Dark sector tunneling field potentials for a dark big bang

Article Publication Date

15-Nov-2024

Pope Francis urges genocide probe of Israel's war on Gaza

Brett Wilkins, 

Common Dreams
November 18, 2024 

Pope Francis (Tiziana FABI)

In a new book set to be released this week, Pope Francis I endorsed a genocide investigation into Israel's war on Gaza—which has killed or maimed more than 150,000 Palestinians and forcibly displaced, starved, or sickened millions more over the past 13 months.


"In the Middle East, where the open doors of nations like Jordan or Lebanon continue to be a salvation for millions of people fleeing conflicts in the region: I am thinking above all of those who leave Gaza in the midst of the famine that has struck their Palestinian brothers and sisters given the difficulty of getting food and aid into their territory," the pontiff wrote in his latest book, which goes on sale in some countries on November 19.

"According to some experts, what is happening in Gaza has the characteristics of a genocide," the Pope added. "It should be carefully investigated to determine whether it fits into the technical definition formulated by jurists and international bodies.

The Pope's words echo last week's finding by a United Nations expert panel that Israel's annihilation of Gaza is "consistent with the characteristics of genocide."

The International Court of Justice—a U.N. organ—is currently weighing a South Africa-led genocide case against Israel backed by more than 30 nations and regional blocs as well as hundreds of groups and experts around the world.

Meanwhile, the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court is seeking arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Israel Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, as well as three former Hamas leaders assassinated by Israel, for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity, including extermination.

Many jurists, scholars, and other experts—including some of Israel's leading Holocaust historians—have called Israel's policies and actions in Gaza genocide. Early in the war, Raz Segal—an Israeli historian and professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Stockton University in New Jersey—called Israel's Gaza onslaught "a textbook case of genocide."

Numerous world leaders and other international officials, artists, entertainers, and others—including half of Democratic voters in the United States surveyed in May—also agree that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.

Many Palestinian Christians have been killed, injured, or otherwise harmed by Israeli forces during the bombardment, invasion, and siege of Gaza. With just 800 to 1,000 people believed remaining in Gaza, members of the world's oldest Christian community warned early in the war that they were "under threat of extinction."

In their most infamous attack on Gaza Christians, Israeli forces bombed the 12th century Saint Porphyrius Greek Orthodox Church, Gaza's oldest, in October 2023, killing 18 Palestinians including numerous children. Among the victims were two women and an infant related to former Republican U.S. Congressman Justin Amash of Michigan.

After an Israeli sniper fatally shot an elderly woman and her daughter on the grounds of a Catholic church in Gaza City last December, Pope Francis condemned what he called an act of "terrorism."


Amid the death and destruction wrought by Israel's assault on Gaza, last December's Christmas celebrations were canceled in Bethlehem, the purported birthplace of Jesus Christ.

"How can we celebrate when we feel this war—this genocide—that is taking place could resume at any moment?" asked Palestinian Lutheran pastor Munther Isaac at the time.

WSJ editorial warns Elon Musk’s 'blow-it-all-up' ideas will devastate U.S. economy
Alex Henderson, AlterNet
November 18, 2024 12:59PM ET


Tesla CEO and X owner Elon Musk speaks as Republican presidential nominee and former U.S. president Donald Trump looks on during a rally at the site of the July assassination attempt against Trump, in Butler, Pennsylvania, U.S., October 5, 2024. REUTERS/Carlos Barria TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY


President-elect Donald Trump ally Elon Musk is telling him that the person he nominates for U.S. Treasury secretary should not be someone who favors "business as usual."

The advice has sent shock waves through the conservative Wall Street Journal.

The newspaper’seditorial board on Sunday emphasized that "disruption" at the U.S. Treasury Department could be risky and dangerous for the country's economy.

The board argued, "Our concern isn't personalities so much as Mr. Musk's apparent belief in economic-policy disruption for its own sake. Treasury isn't the Education Department, or Defense, and financial markets don't want to trade one form of policy uncertainty for another. Steady and knowledgeable economic policy hands are needed if Mr. Trump wants to succeed."

READ MORE:Republican says 'colored people' wouldn't have basketball if not for Abraham Lincoln

In the months ahead, the WSJ editorial board stressed, the U.S. economy will "require careful judgment, not blow-it-all-up rhetoric."

"One risk ahead is the tax bill that needs to pass next year to extend the 2017 tax reform," the WSJ board writes. "With narrow GOP majorities in Congress, that won't be easy. All the more so because Mr. Trump campaigned on new tax cuts, on tips, overtime, Social Security benefits, that will be impossible to afford unless Republicans want to sign up for an even larger deficit blowout than under President Biden."

The next U.S. treasury secretary, the WSJ board stressed, "needs an understanding of financial markets, which nowadays are global."

"A blowup in the foreign-exchange markets somewhere can affect the U.S. economy, and new financial investments like crypto need careful watching," the board argued.

"Mr. Trump has promised to ease political control over these markets, but no one should think they are risk-free. Blowups somewhere are inevitable, and a treasury secretary needs the experience to deal with the fallout in a way that reassures markets."

The Department of Government Efficiency Is Inefficient

Elon Musk evinces no understanding of how government works.


by Timi Iwayemi
November 18, 2024
The American Prospect

Alex Brandon/AP Photo
Elon Musk and Donald Trump at a campaign event in Butler, Pennsylvania, October 5, 2024

The Revolving Door Project, a Prospect partner, scrutinizes the executive branch and presidential power. Follow them at therevolvingdoorproject.org.

Last week, Donald Trump announced that self-christened first buddy Elon Musk will head a newly established Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) alongside Vivek Ramaswamy. The assignment is an obvious reward for Musk’s extensive support of the president-elect’s campaign, deepening the world’s richest man’s already considerable influence over the federal government. As The New York Times notes, Musk’s companies were promised $3 billion after inking nearly 100 different contracts with 17 federal agencies last year.
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It’s safe to assume that these contracts will be exempt from the initiative’s mission to “dismantle government bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure federal agencies”—supposedly a long-held goal of conservatives and their private-sector allies. While targeting the jobs of career public servants, Musk aims to staff the initiative with “super high-IQ small-government revolutionaries willing to work 80+ hours per week on unglamorous cost-cutting.”

It’s similarly reasonable to suspect that Musk is a large holder of the cryptocurrency Dogecoin, which he regularly hypes; hence the decision to name the initiative DOGE to keep the coin in the news cycle for the next couple of years. Considering the irrational nature of meme coins and Musk’s promise of affiliated merchandise, the attention from the appointment alone could easily net a relatively modest wealth increase; the price of Dogecoin is already growing.

Read more from the Revolving Door Project

While details of the enterprise are still vague, Musk and Ramaswamy have made a number of pledges that would be disastrous for almost every American. These include Musk’s vow to cut $2 trillion in federal spending over an amorphous time frame, and Ramaswamy’s call to eliminate allocations to programs with expired authorizations such as veterans’ health care, which lapsed in 1998.

One wonders if Musk and Ramaswamy have even a passing familiarity with the federal budget. The only possible way to achieve Musk’s cost-cutting goals would be to take a wrecking ball to entitlement programs, particularly Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. The budget for federal discretionary spending, which is determined annually in the congressional appropriations process, was $1.6 trillion in fiscal year 2024, or about 26 percent of spending. Even if that figure were zeroed out—fully abolishing, for instance, the FDA, EPA, USDA, NPS, HHS, DOJ, FAA, DOE, and NASA—Musk would be well short of his goal. A further 13 percent (around $800 billion) of the federal budget went toward interest payments on the country’s debt, which would be economic suicide to stop paying. Mandatory outlays, in the form of automatic spending for Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, military pensions, and income security programs like the Earned Income Tax Credit, take up 61 percent (around $4 trillion).


Musk presumably does not actually want to delete agencies that give him multibillion-dollar contracts. The only way to make the cuts he’s talking about would be to gore Medicare and Social Security. What’s most likely to happen is Musk and Ramaswamy will leverage Twitter/X to deceive the public into believing that disastrous cuts to important but trivial federal expenditures are emblematic of widespread government waste.
Musk’s Government-Squeezing Predecessors

Trump’s administration is not the first to bring private-sector cost-cutting strategies to bear on the federal bureaucracy, despite the ends of the federal government being decidedly different from the profit-seeking pursuit of corporations.

Back in 1982, then-President Ronald Reagan instructed industrialist Peter Grace to recommend ways to eliminate government inefficiency. Grace helmed the president’s Private Sector Survey on Cost Control, aka the Grace Commission, which was established by executive order to “identify opportunities for increased efficiency and reduced costs by executive action.” The commission was motivated by the wrongheaded belief that the federal government needed to adopt the private sector’s strategies for survival and success. Grace assembled 161 top executives, organizing them into 36 task forces to either examine specific agencies or study overlapping functions such as personnel management and data processing. The task force leaders met with agency heads, and staff were stationed at agency offices.

The commission produced over 2,000 recommendations, which it claimed would have reduced government spending by enough to eliminate federal deficits at the time (around $400 billion in 1983 dollars). However, public management expert Steven Kelman’s analysis of the headline recommendations found that most of the projected savings reflected either a misunderstanding of the federal government’s processes or gross exaggerations of specific outlays, à la Musk.

Now, there are some ways in which the American government is extremely inefficient—namely through policy complexity and means-testing. While Nordic-style universalist social democracy is simple and therefore cheap to administer, American programs typically have elaborate eligibility rules, requiring an expensive bureaucratic apparatus. Medicaid, food stamps, WIC, EITC, and so forth all spend a lot of money and time making sure applicants are eligible, while many who are eligible fail to fill out the right forms and lose out on benefits. But neither previous efficiency reports nor Musk’s DOGE plan show any awareness of this problem.



Musk may also use the new efficiency initiative as a vehicle for vengeance.

Additionally, as consumer protection advocate Ralph Nader contended following the commission’s report, task force members regularly waded into sensitive policy efforts where they had potential conflicts of interest despite the mandate to focus on operational measures. This is another dynamic Musk is likely to recreate, considering his deep involvement with numerous federal agencies. So even in situations where cuts are off the table, Musk and his allies would glean information on agencies’ internal deliberations as it pertains to regulations, enforcement, and procurement. In practice, insider knowledge like this could privilege Musk’s SpaceX over competitors such as Boeing in future dealings with NASA, for example. What’s more, if there are insufficient firewalls, he could learn more about the multiple investigations into his companies. An obvious example is the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s probes of Tesla for various complaints, including Tesla vehicles’ unexpected braking and loss of steering control.


Musk may also use the new efficiency initiative as a vehicle for vengeance. Seeing how deeply Musk has ingratiated himself with Trump—and the president-elect’s obsession with loyalty—a plausible outcome is regulators putting the kibosh on any investigations or regulations that would trouble Musk’s business interests out of fear of retribution. Clearly, the sprawling nature of Musk’s contracts with the federal government should preclude him from DOGE’s wide-ranging assignment. While there are laws prohibiting outside advisers from engaging in matters affecting their financial interests, enforcement has been inconsistent, so it’s a hurdle Musk could scale with relative ease.

Following in Reagan’s footsteps, the Clinton-Gore administration’s National Performance Review also sought to introduce private-sector techniques to the federal government’s operations. The project, which was led by a rotating cast of federal employees, proposed 1,200 changes to improve federal services. More than half of the changes were implemented, generating $136 billion in savings. Some recommendations, such as electronic filing of tax returns, agency performance targets, and utilization of the internet to provide federal information, were impressive reforms. However, an enduring element of the Review was the decision to cut just over 420,000 federal jobs, pushing core governmental functions into the hands of contractors.

This hollowing out of government capacity is an area in which Musk, Ramaswamy, and Trump are likely to find common ground with the Clinton-Gore project. When Trump first entered office, he instituted a 79-day federal government hiring freeze as part of a similar mission to reorganize agencies in a more efficient manner. This freeze exacerbated already-present gaps in the federal bureaucracy and ultimately resulted in workforce cuts in all departments other than Homeland Security, Veterans Affairs, and Defense. At the agency level, only the Small Business Administration and National Science Foundation were spared from the Trump administration’s downsizing.

Trump’s attack on civil servants also took the form of three executive orders aimed at checking the power of federal employee unions. Taken together, these orders shortened the window for collective bargaining, reduced use of work hours for union activities, and significantly weakened workers’ protections during disciplinary proceedings. In addition to this, the Trump administration also created by executive order a new classification for federal workers—Schedule F—which would have stripped workers’ protections and allowed Trump to fire them for being insufficiently loyal. The Biden administration reversed this EO and instituted a rule clarifying the application of merit system principles to the federal civil service.

DOGE is a new weapon in Trump’s ongoing war against the administrative state. But it’s important to remain clear-eyed about the value federal civil servants provide. These individuals help ensure the safety of our food, medicine, transportation, air, and water. They are also the backbone of our education, health care, and financial regulatory systems. There is no doubt that many Americans feel burned by their recent interactions with these systems, but federal employees are the wrong targets of their ire. If we want a government that is readily equipped to challenge the corporate villains who are committed to padding their bottom line regardless of the consequences to ordinary Americans, then protecting civil servants and government services must remain top of the agenda.



Timi Iwayemi is a research director at the Revolving Door Project.

Tesla’s Bid to Pull Up the EV Ladder

The rumored end to the $7,500 federal rebate for electric vehicles sounds like it would hurt the nation’s biggest EV maker. Quite the opposite, actually.


by David Dayen
November 18, 2024
The American Prospect

David Zalubowski/AP Photo

The Treasury Department announced in June that it had paid about $1 billion in EV rebates in the first six months of the year.

The $7,500 federal electric-vehicle rebate was always likely to be the most endangered of the Biden administration’s clean-energy investments. Tax breaks for building factories at least creates jobs and, perhaps more important, corporate stakeholders. But the EV rebates benefit consumers whose lifestyle choices are coded as liberal. States that didn’t vote for Trump lead the way on EV adoption. This fits with the “punish my enemies” imperative of the Trump administration.

But there was a hitch here: Elon Musk decided to become Donald Trump’s biggest and wealthiest fan. For a moment, you could see the EV rebates sticking around. After all, nobody has thrived more off those rebates, including the ones in place before the Inflation Reduction Act, than Tesla.

Unfortunately, that is not the logic of the would-be monopolist. You look around at you and your competition and wonder who would be hurt the most by a government action, and if it’s everybody else, you endorse it. That’s the logic behind Tesla’s apparent support for eliminating the rebate: essentially pulling up the ladder after climbing it themselves.


More from David Dayen

Reuters was the first to report that the EV rebates would be on the way out, and that Tesla has told the Trump energy transition team—which includes none other than oil billionaire Harold Hamm—that it would be OK with that. Ending the rebates would position Trump on the side of Big Oil, but it also helps, in a small way, to solve a burgeoning fiscal problem.

Trump and the Republicans want to extend tax cuts that were massively tilted toward the rich, and add on about a dozen other tax cuts Trump gave away like candy during the campaign. This is going to bust the budget, which has already got fiscal conservatives breaking out in hives. One way out of the hard choices to follow is to find “offsets” that will either raise revenue or bring back savings. That’s kind of the purpose of Tesla CEO Musk’s other effort, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

The Treasury Department announced in June that it had paid about $1 billion in EV rebates in the first six months of the year. Multiply that out over a decade and you have $20 billion. Even if it were twice that, it would be a drop in the bucket compared to the trillions of dollars in red ink that extending and expanding the Trump tax cuts would create. But Republicans will be desperate for just about any offset once they get hit with the recognition that tariffs and fake DOGE charts about government waste aren’t going to fill that budget crater.

So what is Tesla’s calculus? As Musk himself said on an earnings call in July, Tesla was the first mover in the EV transition in the U.S., and is simply better positioned to do away with the EV incentives, after making good use of them for many years.



Tesla was the first mover in the EV transition in the U.S., and is simply better positioned to do away with the EV incentives.

Tesla has dropped from an 80 percent share of EV sales in 2020 to less than 50 percent last quarter. But it still has so much more EV manufacturing experience that it can better manage the loss of the subsidy. Ford and General Motors and other legacy automakers, on the other hand, need those subsidies to make their vehicles more affordable and bridge the gap to getting their production chains in place, as do startups that are trying to gain a foothold in the market.

Despite the hype over the waning EV transition, these legacy automakers were actually ramping up sales, particularly GM, which is now the second-largest American EV maker. But as they build out their factories, the losses have been high. Not even GM has reached EV profitability yet. And now it’ll be harder to sell those vehicles, leading to more losses. A National Bureau of Economic Research paper from October estimates that eliminating the rebates will reduce EV registrations by about 300,000 per year.

Combined with the elimination of the tax incentives for sales is the regulatory structure that was newly instituted by the Biden administration, putting in place strict emissions standards. That is almost certain to go, meaning that automakers would have no carrot or stick to build EVs. You could expect the more established firms to sink back to internal combustion engine vehicles, especially if they don’t have stringent tailpipe emissions limitations.

Tesla is getting battered in China and is simply not keeping up with global competition. All domestic automakers would be damaged in an industry that’s clearly going electric. Other countries are spending heavily to keep pace with Chinese subsidies, and Biden’s previous U.S. investments. But Trump is planning to continue a holdover policy from the Biden administration and close off the U.S. to foreign EVs. Tesla is effectively retrenching, trying to increase its relative position in the U.S., even through policies that would hurt the company globally. The result will be a cramped, puny U.S. auto industry that isn’t all that exportable.

Importantly, the $7,500 rebate was reserved for vehicles that shifted their supply chains to the U.S., including batteries and critical mineral components. Without that incentive, auto companies could pivot back to sourcing materials from China, which will be likely hit with high tariffs. So no matter what companies do, making electric vehicles will get more expensive, and amid that uncertainty, the one company that has their supply chain mostly in place will benefit: Tesla.


Is there going to be any internal resistance to a dramatic reversal for the EV transition and the reduction of fossil fuel pollution? I would watch the two Republican senators from Tennessee, Marsha Blackburn and Bill Hagerty. Volkswagen has a big EV factory in Chattanooga (recently organized by the United Auto Workers) and other proposals from GM and Ford in the state. If they aren’t going to defend the EV rebate, nobody will. Other Republican lawmakers in Indiana, North Carolina, and South Carolina will have to decide whether to stand with Trump or their own constituents’ jobs.

There are certainly coalitions and trade groups that will want to save the EV tax credits, but there’s a bit of mystery to them. There are actually two sets of tax credits, one for sales (the consumer rebate) and one for the production of EV and battery facilities. The reports I’ve seen about mobilizing to save the tax credits seem more focused on the latter. But of course they are connected; if demand suffers from losing the $7,500 rebate, it doesn’t matter if the factory can be built more easily.

The sunk cost of existing investment means that auto companies won’t pull out of making EVs entirely. But it will be more of a niche market, likely with substandard infrastructure for charging, especially on long trips. (The Biden administration provided federal money for EV chargers; that could also go away.) Tesla has an advantage there too with its Supercharger network, and with Elon Musk sitting at the feet of the president, that’s sure to be official policy across the auto space.

Whether the EV industry will be strangled, as it was in the 1990s, or not might depend on whether there’s a surge of demand in the final weeks of the year. A strong quarter could give all automakers a renewed push to defend an EV transition that’s working. Otherwise, you may have only one option to go electric in the future, and if you don’t like how the Cybertruck looks, tough.

David Dayen  is the Prospect’s executive editor. His work has appeared in The Intercept, The New Republic, HuffPost, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and more. His most recent book is ‘Monopolized: Life in the Age of Corporate Power.’

FAA has proposed large fines for Musk — and he may soon hold power over them: report

Sarah K. Burris

RAW STORY
November 18, 2024 

A battle could be looming between SpaceX CEO Elon Musk and the Federal Aviation Administration, which handles, among other things, air traffic as planes fly through U.S. airspace.

Musk faced proposed fines last year of about $633,000 over SpaceX violations, Politico reported, including over the company's unauthorized rocket firing.

When a rocket launch is scheduled, airplanes need to know to stay away from the air space.

Musk was furious that his rocket was delayed "for months because of a pending Fish and Wildlife Service review" and he deployed a "scorched earth" tactic, according to Politico.

"He’s used his social media megaphone to threaten to sue the agency for 'regulatory overreach,' accused it of 'politically motivated behavior,' taunted the FAA with crude humor and poked at the agency’s rules, which he says move too slowly to meet his goal of getting human civilization to Mars. He has also called for the resignation of FAA leader Mike Whitaker — who has four years left on the job, assuming he serves out his term," according to the report.

Trump said he plans to appoint Musk and one-time opponent Vivek Ramaswamy to run a largely symbolic agency known as the "Department of Government Efficiency."

Rep. Rick Crawford (R-AR) has been floated as Trump's appointment to head the Department of Transportation, which oversees the FAA. Politico reports he's indicated a willingness to overhaul space regulations.

“There’s definitely some changes that need to be made,” Crawford told POLITICO last week, also echoing Musk's complaints that the FAA is too slow.

Republicans have complained in the past that they can't compete against China in the Mars race while complying with government safety regulations.

Read the full report here.

Farmers panic that Trump policy could cause 'catastrophic nightmare': report

Kathleen Culliton
November 18, 2024 

RAW STORY

Trucks on farmland. (Emily Marie Wilson/Shutterstock)

Farmers are panicking about President-elect Donald Trump's return to the White House in 2025, according to a new report.

Trump's promise to enact mass deportations could result in a "massive loss of revenue" for farmers who rely on immigrant labor to stay afloat, Newsweek reported Monday.

"The idea of mass deportations is frightening and scary, just on a humane level," dairy farmer Jennifer Tilton Flood reportedly said. "With regards to our community, mass deportations could affect our entire dairy industry throughout the U.S."

About 950,000, or nearly 45 percent, out of an estimated 2.2 million farm laborers in the U.S. are undocumented immigrants, Newsweek reported.

Flood argued businesses and churches should expect a "catastrophic nightmare" to come as U.S. Customs and Border Protection came under Trump's control.

"There is a great chance for families to be broken apart," said Flood. "A lot of my team are raising Americans at home, and so it's tough. There is a lot of concern and there's a lot of panic."

Karoline Leavitt, the Trump campaign national press secretary, has reportedly said her boss' administration will dedicate itself to "the largest deportation operation of illegal criminals, drug dealers and human traffickers in American history."

Experts warn such a mass deportation effort could come with a hefty price tag of up to $315 billion, according to the report.

Restaurant owners say they're afraid of the cost to their businesses.

"If these workers are deported, restaurants will close, leading to massive losses in revenue and a significant downturn in the economy," Sam Sanchez, a National Restaurant Association board member, told Newsweek.

"Many of these individuals are good, law-abiding citizens who worked tirelessly throughout the pandemic but were ineligible for unemployment benefits," Sanchez added. "We need policies that ensure these essential workers can stay and continue contributing to our economy."

Legal experts knock down New York Times' reassurance that Trump can't have third term

Sarah K. Burris

RAW STORY
November 18, 2024 

A New York Times columnist was criticized as being naive after he wrote a fact-check claiming recent suggestions Donald Trump might stay in power after his next term as president are impossible.

Writing Monday, Neil Vigdor wrote Trump "cannot run for re-election again," citing constitutionally set two-term limits.

Trump made a comment to the House Republican Conference last week suggesting he would stay in office if they could "figure something out."

His campaign said that the statement was nothing more than "a joke."

However, two former federal prosecutors pointed out that the Times' writer doesn't take into consideration that Trump has violated the Constitution before with no consequences.

Also Read: A mysterious group of Republicans is secretly rewriting the Constitution

"The Constitution also says he requires the 'advise and consent' of the Senate to approve his nominations," said Joyce Vance on Blue Sky.

She was referencing the Trump team teasing that they might push through some Cabinet appointments without Senate confirmation by calling for recess appointments.

Jill Wine-Banks, known for her participation in the legal team that prosecuted the Watergate cases, agreed with Vance, pointing to other times Trump ignored the rules outlined in the Constitution.


"Joyce is right to be skeptical. Criminals find ways around inconvenient laws, and in Trump’s case, the Constitution," Wine-Banks posted on Blue Sky.

"He violated the Emoluments Clause with no consequences," she pointed out. "He’s getting away with violating criminal laws because of SCOTUS. But this is even worse because if he gets away with recess appointments, it destroys the foundation of our democracy."